Time2Track Blog

I recently defended my dissertation before going on internship. I set this goal during my 3rd year of graduate school. I really wanted to be 100% focused on internship when I began my rotation, and I wanted to be able to become immersed in as many opportunities as possible, including research and attending extra didactics and seminars.

However, I knew that with my dissertation looming over my head, this would be much more difficult to do and I would be left with no down time at all.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me how I accomplished this, so I thought I’d share some tips. Of course there are always unforeseen roadblocks that complicate the process, and defending prior to internship is not always possible, but here is how I did it:

As aspiring mental health professionals and clinicians, we are constantly looking for new ways to improve our practice to better serve our clients. As a field, psychology is known for integrating new innovations into existing practices.

It is this receptivity and openness to new methods and practices that have been essential components to maintaining clinical competence within our field.

The practice of Clinical Psychology looks deeply at people’s motives, feelings, thoughts and actions in hopes of providing them relief from distress. It is a profession that requires deep empathy for humanity’s struggles to help bring about change. The field is one that requires significant training, education as well as mental and emotional strength.

As clinical psychologists, we work with clients of all ages facing countless challenges. Our clients come from all walks of life and social groups, representing the larger American society.

In providing mental health treatment, we are addressing topics that impact humanity as a whole; including violence, trauma, loss, grief, politics – the list goes on.

The impact of psychotherapy is enormous and touches individuals, families, and society. Despite all of this, we are in a profession that is paid drastically less than other fields with the same level of education.

I remember being in grade school and hearing the age-old cliché, “Big boys don’t cry,” whenever a male peer began to show he was upset about something.

At the time, I didn’t think twice about it, and I’m sure there were moments when I repeated those very words, not realizing the harm I was doing. Regardless of intention, I now see that these types of subtle messages convey a normative stance of stoicism, invulnerability, and detachment that contribute to toxic ideals of masculinity.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve watched friends’ and family members’ facial expressions drop and felt a chilling silence upon mentioning various forms of mental illness.

These are open-minded people. They are willing to talk about politics, religion, drugs, and other controversial topics. But they withdraw when the topic of mental illness comes up.

I don’t start these conversations to cause a ruckus. Instead, I want to honestly talk about the impact mental illness has on individuals and society as a whole. Our mental health system is dysfunctional and we need to address it head-on if we hope to change anything. This entails embracing mental health as an acceptable and appropriate subject.

With the APPIC Match 2017 approaching, the search for the “perfect” internship site begins. As you start to draft your spreadsheet of internship sites, I strongly encourage you to consider internship opportunities that you might not have given thought to previously.

Each Army internship site has a niche which makes it unique; however, all of the Army internship sites share a common thread, which is a generalist approach to training. I have received training in neuropsychology (TBI, memory disorders), assessment, health psychology (biofeedback, bariatric surgery evaluations, pain/sleep/diabetes/weight management, smoking cessation), and military...

In order to excel in graduate school, you may have to start developing certain habits and practices. Some of these include dedication, sacrifice, anxiety, and for many, a dash of perfectionism.

Perfectionism, however, can be both a blessing and a curse.

One the one hand, perfectionism allows you to push yourself farther than perhaps you thought you could go and to produce work that is of a higher caliber.

Unfortunately, perfectionism can also lead you down a dark road. As we all know, nothing is ever perfect, and if you expect your work to be, you will always find it lacking. For many people, this creates a self-destructive cycle of feeling like the work is never going to be good enough.

As a result, people experience anxiety from those worries, and then avoidance to help cope with the feelings of anxiety. This is procrastination.

Every February thousands of doctoral psychology students anxiously wait to see if they’ve matched to an internship site through APPIC. The reality is that there are many qualified students who don't match.

Look at you, reading a blog post about politics on a psychology website.

And who can blame you? Only about 24 million people may have tuned in to the live presidential debate between Clinton and Trump [1], but everyone is talking about it. With the presidential election coming up, you can bet your clipboard that your clients are going to bring this into session.

Most clinicians can agree that political conversations have little place in the therapy room. Angsting about presidential prospects and governmental goings-on appears to have limited healing power for our clients. Regardless, our clients continue to ask us where we stand on gun control, whether we are pro-life or pro-choice, and for whom we plan to vote.